An elephant’s life

As a tourist in Thailand, you can sign up for any number of different tours. City tours, countryside tours, hill tribe tours, market tours, temple tours…..you get the picture. Many of the tours include a trip to an elephant camp where the animals take you for a short tour of the area. Sadly, many of these elephant camps are nothing more than a group of poor, uneducated villagers, who mistreat their elephants, and abandon them when they find a better job. It’s very sad, and very cruel. Even in the heart of Bangkok, we’ve seen men walking elephants down the street in the peak of rush hour, just to sell a ride. We were lucky, however, to visit probably the best elephant camp in Thailand. Rather than being chained to a fence each night and taken on countless tours all day long, these elephants are brought home to the jungle every evening, where they roam free and live like they are still wild. During they day, they do no more than one or two tours, and are treated very lovingly by their trainers. Sadly, we learned from an employee of this camp, the elephant camps in the north (like the one we went to in Chiang Mai) are notorious for the mistreatment of elephants. It makes us both very, very sad that we unknowingly contributed to the cruelty by paying for our elephant tour in the north.

PICTURES OF TIGER TEMPLE DAY (AND ELEPHANT RIDE)